LOLapps Returns After Facebook UID Issue

Developer LOLapps, whose access to the Facebook service was unexpectedly terminated over the weekend, said on Monday that it was back.

Developer LOLapps, whose access to the Facebook service was unexpectedly terminated over the weekend, said on Monday that it was back.

The outage came after The Wall Street Journalreported that many Facebook applications share users' personal information with advertising networks and other Internet-tracking companies.

Facebook said Sunday, however, that the Journal was exaggerating the problem and that Facebook is working to put an end to any inadvertent data sharing.

Facebook acknowledged that in some cases, user IDs were shared because of "how browsers work," but that the sharing was unintentional.

"Nevertheless, we are committed to ensuring that even the inadvertent passing of UIDs is prevented and all applications are in compliance with our policy," Facebook's Mike Vernal wrote.

LOLapps, which serves 150 million users via social games like "Dante's Inferno," or the Cryptic Studios-based "Champions Online" Facebook game, or even one of Lolapps' independent titles like "Yakuza Lords," were met with an error message over the weekend. But chief executive Arjun Sethi said that the company was simply caught up in the UID mess, like other developers.

"It has been a big weekend in the news for privacy and Facebook applications," Sethi wrote. "As tonight's Facebook developer blog post states, 'In most cases, developers did not intend to pass this information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work.' This statement applies to Lolapps.

"When we were informed of the issue the relationship that put us into this category was immediately dissolved," Sethi added. "Since Lolapps was founded in 2008, we have always been committed to Facebook's platform policies and will continue to be as we grow."

The news comes five months after sites like Facebook and MySpace fixed a glitch that allowed advertising partners to see user ID information. Specifically, advertising partners might receive user names or ID numbers tied to member's personal profiles if that member clicked on an ad within Facebook or MySpace.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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